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Effects Of Peer Feedback On Writing Proficiency And Learner Autonomy Of English Majors

Posted on:2015-04-22Degree:MasterType:Thesis
Country:ChinaCandidate:Y Y CuiFull Text:PDF
GTID:2285330431959551Subject:Foreign Linguistics and Applied Linguistics
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In China’s foreign language teaching of writing, the product approach still plays a dominant role in classrooms. Under this traditional approach, the teacher assessing students’ written works once and for all is the only reviewer for students’ writings, and students have to accept feedback and suggestions from the teacher passively, which may lead to a lack of interaction and form a shackle on students’ creativity and critical thinking ability. Thus, this traditional assessment model greatly hinders the development of students’ writing proficiency and learning autonomy. In view of that, more and more experts and researchers attach importance onto the process approach and hence, peer feedback which is a fundamental element of process approach. In peer feedback model that takes students as the center of teaching, students review the writings and provide feedbacks for each other, which can contribute to the development and improvement of students’ interacting abilities, communicating skills and cognitive abilities. With the increasingly prominent practical significance in foreign language teaching, peer feedback is regarded as one important feedback model to affect the quality of students’writing output.This research aims at examining the effects of peer feedback on EFL students’ writing proficiency and learner autonomy. In a quasi-experimental approach, the research intends to collect and analyze authentic data from an experimental group and a control group so as to find the possible effects of peer feedback in the experimental EFL writing class. The subjects include101freshmen from School of Foreign Languages, Beijing Forestry University, among which,48students majoring in English are assigned as the experimental group and53majoring in Business English are assigned as the control group. During one-semester experiment, the researcher first investigates all the students’ original writing proficiency and learner autonomy level through a questionnaire and a pre-test. Then the researcher implements one-semester teaching intervention through applying peer feedback in the experimental group, while the control group still receives the traditional teacher feedback. Finally, at the end of the semester, the subjects from the two groups fill out a questionnaire again and take a post-test.Through the analysis of the empirical data, this research confirms that peer feedback has a facilitating effect on improving students’writing proficiency and learner autonomy. Through the experimental study, it is found that peer feedback and teacher feedback are complementary to each other, so the researcher recommends that the two feedback models should be combined together in the EFL teaching of writing. Pedagogically speaking, this research provides a meaningful reference for the application of peer feedback in EFL writing teaching.
Keywords/Search Tags:Peer feedback, writing proficiency, learner autonomy, teacher feedback
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